When using VMWare workstation you are given the ability to assign the size of the hard drive when you create the Virtual machine. Sometimes you can under resource the machine and you run out of space inside the guest operating system. I would like to share with you an issue I recently encountered when I logged into Vsphere to perform the simple task of extending the size of one of the hard disks. I found that the VMware extend disk was greyed out and there was no option for me to extend the virtual hard disk.
Click here on How to Increase Disk Space in VMware
I checked with a couple of other systems and it was possible on all of them. What would be the difference between this particular VM and the others?
Solution – Cannot extend VMWare Disk
After some time of investigating, the reason was finally found and it was actually easy in the end. There was a snapshot on this VM! I found that there had been a backup job running for a few days and was locked up and had not been checked.
Link to solution for Unable to extend VMWare Disk- Unable to expand the hard disk in VMWare 6.5 – Greyed out
Unfortunately in the new web-based vSphere user interface, an active snapshot cannot be seen as fast as in the earlier vSphere days (VMware Infrastructure and vSphere GUI). To check if a virtual machine still holds a snapshot, the “Actions” drop-down menu needs to be opened, followed by the “Snapshots” entry to then finally click on “Manage Snapshots”.
And here, finally, the snapshot can be deleted:
Online resizing
Once the backup had been completed or snapshot was deleted, the virtual hard disks could be (online) and you have the ability to extend the VMWare Disk:
Related Content – How to Increase Disk Size in VMware Virtual Machine
